Tag cloud
A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
The first widely known tag cloud appeared on Flickr, the photo sharing site. That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Technorati, among others.
The first published appearance of a tag cloud can be attributed to the "subconcious files" in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995).
Types
There are two main types of tag cloud, distinguished by their meaning rather than appearance.
In the first, size represents the number of times that tag has been applied to a single item. This is useful as a means of displaying metadata about an item that has been democratically 'voted' on and where precise results are not desired. A good example of this is Last.fm, which uses this method as a means of displaying the genre with which an artist or track has been tagged.
In the second, size represents the number of items that have been given that tag. This is used as a presentation of the popularity of the tags and can be indicative of the content they cover, although in most contexts such information is of little use. Interestingly, the more prominent the tag the less information it contains. An example of this is Flickr.
The utility of this method could be greatly increased if one tag cloud lead to another, essentially forming a conjunction of tags that could be used to more precisely identify content. Implementations of this exist at wortwolke.de, a german web index, and blogoforum.com[1] , folksonomy forum.
References
See also
External links
- del.icio.us - cloud of users' most popular words tagging web pages
- Technorati - most popular tags of blogs
- Flickr - most popular tags of photos
- zeitcode_doc - Archive of Jim Flanagan's Zeitgeist.pm module and documentation.